


Kindred Instruments

by Taselby



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Doubt, Gen, Moral Ambiguity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 14:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16138733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taselby/pseuds/Taselby
Summary: In the absence of knowledge, faith sometimes had to suffice. After everything else, though, trust in the ineffable plan was more difficult than it should be, especially when it seemed more like pinball than purpose. Aziraphale felt perilously close to doubt.





	Kindred Instruments

**Author's Note:**

> Updated 10/20/18 to fix some bits that were bothering me.  
>  
> 
>  _The surgeon and farmer meet_  
>  _And each greets the other with a bow_  
>  _They're kindred instruments, you know_  
>  _The scalpel and the plow_  
>  _In the shadow of the mountain_  
>  _We work when work abounds_  
>  _And we wear out all our prayers_  
>  _When the work runs out_  
>  \--Dessa, _The Beekeeper_

Hospitals have always been more or less the same. They smelled better these days, or at least different, the sharp, bitter fragrance of antiseptics and cleaning fluid replacing the reek of blood and torn bowels. The blood was still there, of course. But like the rest of modern society, they’d gotten better at hiding it. The despair was a constant, but the classics never really went out of fashion.  
  
Deep into the night Aziraphale walked the halls. The light was cold and the air was cold, and the carefully bland landscapes on the walls were cold in their own way, too. The floor was so clean that it squeaked under his shoes. Some few of the hospital staff walked briskly from one location to the next, but they paid him no mind. Neither did the other weary souls there, pacing slowly, clutching vending machine sandwiches and paper cups of burned coffee. The nurses didn’t need him, and these others were lost in ways he couldn’t ease.  
  
A tinny rendition of Rock-a-Bye Baby played over the speakers, announcing a birth, and he smiled at that, then continued up the hall, shoes creaking with every step.  
  
The chapel was a curiosity more than anything else—he’d never really understood why humans built particular places to go and pray. Aziraphale liked cathedrals, but the building itself was no more holy than the inspiration for its design, the skilled craftsmanship of the woodwork, or the careful beauty of the sculptures and the stained glass. He very much liked the stained glass. The hospital chapel was small and stale, just two rows of chairs, a tired podium, and a backlit plastic panel that was supposed to look like stained glass. Very…what was the word? Nondenominational. As if the names of their collected rituals, the petty details of their worship, mattered to Him. Humans got themselves into a lather about the silliest things.  
  
The door creaked, and Aziraphale turned to see the chaplain, an elderly man as blandly nondenominational as the rest of the accoutrements. The man blinked in surprise and composed his face into lines of gentle concern. “Good evening,” he said quietly. “You look troubled. Can I be of assistance?”  
  
Aziraphale smiled politely. “What? Oh, no. I was just looking.” For what, exactly, he didn’t say. And what could he have said, even if he were of a mind? That he was pulling on an old role as if it were his magician’s frock, and hoping the fit was as he remembered? That he was testing the limits of an 11-year-old boy’s concept of manipulation? That maybe, _maybe_ ineffability was no longer enough to satisfy, and if he needed more in this strange and boundless future, he had no idea how to go about getting it.  
  
It was said that angels couldn’t sin. That they couldn’t be disobedient to the wishes of their Father, as they have no free will. Aziraphale snorted. There were lines, yes, but a war in Heaven, a lost sword, and a demonic friend put paid to much of that trite propaganda.  
  
The chaplain waited patiently for him to find his voice. Aziraphale wondered how much the man truly saw, if he knew his guest in these long, quiet moments. He expected not.  
  
Giving in to impulse, he sat down on the edge of a chair, and was quietly pleased as the chaplain sat opposite him, keeping them metaphorically on equal ground. They shared the stillness for a long minute before Aziraphale broke the silence. “This is a very lonely place isn’t it.” It wasn’t really a question. “I was expecting it to be more sad, but instead it’s quite lonely.”  
  
“I don’t…yes, sometimes,” the chaplain agreed, somewhat confused. “Are you here visiting someone?”  
  
The crude landscape of the plastic panel glowed softly in blues and greens. “Something like that, yes. It’s been a long time since I visited.”  
  
The chaplain’s dark eyes were clear and sharp, flicking over Aziraphale’s face, searching, but still not seeing. “Would you like me to pray with you?”  
  
“No, thank you. But I’ll sit with you while you pray, if you like.”  
  
The man nodded, understanding all the wrong things, and moved to the chair beside Aziraphale’s, offering his hands. Aziraphale took them both in his own. noting their warmth, the strength under the fragile skin. He bent his head, listening to familiar requests for comfort, peace, and reassurance of a place in His Kingdom after death. He took the kindness for what it was, and let the man keep his illusions.  
  
Angels didn’t really pray, and he wasn’t now. Knowledge was, after all, a far different thing than faith, and he had other ways of communicating with his superiors if there was need. Though given how eager they’d been for the apocalypse to come, he was in no real hurry to hear from them. Still, there was a contentment here, sharing this moment. The man’s faith was like a deep pool, clear and quiet, and if there was no sense of anything actually holy in this place, there was still that measure of ease.  
  
The chaplain said a quiet “Amen,” as his prayer ended, and pressed Aziraphale’s hands.  
  
“Bless you,” Aziraphale said, not really knowing what his blessings were worth these days, “you’re very kind.” He stood and stepped past the chaplain, tucking some money into the donation box on his way out. The scents of hand sanitizer and pipe tobacco lingered in the room behind him. It was very odd to feel ministered to, and that sense of comfort, of being cared for, lay over him as he left.  
  
He shared the elevator to the third floor with a young nurse in green scrubs who held a large envelope under his arm. Aziraphale waited until the doors slid open and the nurse stepped out, all business and long strides. He followed him around past the nurses station toward the patient rooms. No one noticed him pass, squeaky shoes and all, mostly because he really didn’t want them to. It was an easy trick—not invisibility, precisely— he just made himself unimportant in that moment. And like the chaplain, their own unwillingness to see took care of the rest.  
  
Hospitals never really slept. Neither, it seemed, did the patients. He took a turn down one wide corridor, walking slowly and with no particular destination. The easy peace he felt with the chaplain faded as he passed the open doorways, dim and mysterious, ink wash portraits of loneliness and pain. One woman awaited surgery, two recovered from it, and a man was being slowly consumed by a dreadful infection. Two more nurses paid him no mind at all, all purpose and calm, silent concern sitting in their hearts like a stone.  
  
And one young girl saw him there, so utterly convinced he was the tooth fairy she’d asked to see his wings. Wrong kind of wings, of course, but her intuition wasn’t that far off.  
  
He smiled at her and said no.  
  
Despite that disappointment, she sold him her left front tooth for the exorbitant price of a £1 coin. And if her asthma was lightened along with his pocketbook, well.  
  
The world was writ— _rewrit_ \--large and small by Adam Young, and given back to them with no greater commandment than to stop _messing people about_. And here he was, wayward angel, neglectful Principality, pacing unseen under the fluorescent lights, hiding as surely as if he’d never left his shop. It smacked of cowardice.  
  
The question remained as to whether or not these minor miracles counted as messing people about, but he had risked more for less, before.  
  
The next room belonged to one Mrs. Walker, who lay pale and sleeping in a haze of exhaustion and post-surgical medications. The air was sour, the rot hanging in it like a tangible thing—antiseptics and bandages and a sickness that ran deeper than the surgeon’s knife could reach. Most of the light came from the open door to the hall and the small colored lights from the monitors and equipment. They looked almost like Christmas, stacked there in the corner by the bed. Aziraphale sat and took her hand as she lay there, a vision of white on white, and gently stroked the hair back from her face. She wasn’t emaciated as one expected the terminally ill to be, and looked for all the world as if a couple of days of sun and a good meal were all she needed. She’d look right as rain, except for the cancer.  
  
The slow minutes spun out, measured by the soft beeping of the monitors and the mechanical rasp of the automatic blood pressure cuff. Beastly things.  
  
“She’s one of ours, you know.”  
  
Aziraphale looked up to see Crowley silhouetted in the door, darkness hanging off of him like a twisted halo. The blood pressure cuff released itself with a hiss. “Not yet,” he said quietly.  
  
“Hm,” Crowley hummed and stepped inside. The shadows didn’t leave him so much as bleed away into the darkness of the room. There was a second chair next to Aziraphale, but he didn’t sit, just pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and tucked his hands into his jacket pockets. If he stood just a bit closer, Aziraphale imagined he might smell the leather mingling with the tang of the antiseptics. “Adultery, gluttony, lust…” Crowley ticked off points, “atheism.”  
  
Aziraphale looked up, feeling impossibly heavy, the sadness of this place seeping into him. Another tinny, music-box nursery song played over the speakers. There were beginnings in this place, too, but it was hard to feel the joy from here. He ran a careful thumb across Mrs. Walker’s knuckles, careful not to disturb the IV cannula. “Charity, diligence, kindness… temperance near the end,” he countered. “And she believed, once.”  
  
“Are you here to heal her, angel?” The word had more weight than it usually did as a sideways endearment. Here it was a reminder.  
  
“No,” he said. “She’s far beyond my ability in any event. Raphael was always the better healer.” He covered his face with his hands and sucked a deep breath. They smelled of antiseptic now, too. “What are you doing here, Crowley?”  
  
Crowley had never cared for sick rooms and hospitals, saying the smell clung to his clothes. Aziraphale looked down his hands and thought that maybe there was something to that after all. Privately, he’d guessed that it was the suffering that put Crowley off—he’d always preferred to deal in various temptations, leaving it to the humans to decide their own fates. Aziraphale could respect that.  
  
“Oh, you know. In the neighborhood,” Crowley dodged the question and ran his fingers over a wall sconce, then flicked dust off his fingertips. He tilted his head and looked hard at Aziraphale, eyes like tarnished brass in the dark. “What are _you_ doing here?”  
  
Aziraphale glared at him, then decided he really was too tired for their usual games. The chair, a miserable metal-framed thing built more for convenient storage than for comfort, creaked as he got up. He tugged the blanket up under the Mrs. Walker’s chin and stepped out into the hall. Nobody gave them a second glance, just the way Aziraphale wanted it. _Nothing to see here, move on_.  
  
Crowley laid a warm hand on his shoulder. “What are you doing, Aziraphale?”  
  
_They are my people_ , he couldn’t say, _I was given them to watch and I have kept myself apart for so long. And now there is time for_ … for what? The thought stuttered to a halt. “I don’t know,” he said at last, too honest. Some small part of him still warned about being too familiar with a demon. The far larger part had long since stopped seeing a demon and instead saw simply Crowley. “Trying to help. This seemed as good a place to start as any.”  
  
The grip on his shoulder tightened just a bit. Steady, solid. “You couldn’t have started with, I don’t know, donating to a children’s library? Teaching people to read? You’ve always been good with books.”  
  
_And not with people_ , Aziraphale filled in the rest by himself. He shook off Crowley’s hand and turned to face him directly. “Your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary,” he said in what he hoped was a firm tone.  
  
Crowley stepped back and held up his hands in surrender. “Fine. It’s your headache.” He turned as if to go, and then turned back. “Hey, look—there’s a guy up on Five who lost his leg in an accident. Real salt of the Earth type, bet he’d give you the shirt right off his back. Bit rough around the edges, but good where it counts, you know? He’s up there right now absolutely seething with doubt, and he could probably use a visit…”  
  
Aziraphale just stared at him, horrified, until Crowley trailed off and his face hardened.  
  
“She’s not going to repent, you know,” Crowley said, cold. “You can’t win this one. Better to take the one you can.”  
  
“It’s not about _winning_!” Aziraphale snapped. One of the nurses looked up. He clicked his jaw shut against all the other things he wanted to say and slammed the veil closer around them.  
  
“Then what is it? Because you’re not helping her—there is no room in her heart for what you offer.”  
  
Aziraphale took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “What would you know about the size of her heart? Compassion and comfort aren’t in such short supply that we must ration them out only to the most deserving. And… and if we did, who decides where the need is great enough? Which souls are to be offered peace? It’s not our place to decide who is worthy of Heaven. Or damned to Hell.”  
  
Crowley stood a little straighter, and looked him in the eyes, really looked. “No. I’ve seen you turn your back as whole cities burned. This isn’t about her at all, is it? Hoping to score some _charitable works_ points with Upstairs, or just paying penance for some imagined failing?”  
  
The air was so very close. He pulled a breath, another. He didn’t need it, didn’t need to breathe, didn’t need his heart pounding, making his ears swim. He wore a human guise, wrapped their flesh about himself like an ill-fitting cloak, but he wasn’t human. He didn’t need any of this. When he opened his eyes, Crowley was still there, a tall darkness in the white hall, his body tight with something Aziraphale couldn’t name.  
  
“That’s low, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, clenching around the unspoken part.  
  
“Yes, it is,” Crowley said, too gentle by far. “But am I wrong?”  
  
Crowley wasn’t, but again, it wasn’t an imagined failing that lay heavy on Aziraphale’s heart. And he had no real idea of what the penance should be. Ask forgiveness, say the rosary, perform the charitable works that Crowley mocked so viciously. Read the Gospel of Luke.  
  
Aziraphale liked Jesus, honestly, but he’d always thought that Prodigal Son nonsense was laying it on a bit thick. _In nomine Patris_ …  
  
Around the corner an alarm went off as a man’s heart heaved a weary sigh and quit. Upstairs, surgeons sang Beatles songs as they pieced together a boy’s shattered arm. And over the speakers another wretched repetition of that nursery song played. Everywhere people were grieving, suffering, rejoicing. Drinking burned coffee in paper cups.  
  
Aziraphale swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. They were all so fragile, so _human_. He took a deliberate step back from Crowley. “Three of the nurses are stealing medication. Five of the office staff are falsifying overtime records. And two of the doctors are committing adultery, one of them as we speak. That should be enough to keep you busy, if you’re so concerned about _points_.”  
  
“Oh, for the love of… you can be such an ass. None of that is my doing, angel.” And there it was again, that sideways endearment.  
  
“Does it matter? This woman,” Aziraphale nodded at the doorway, “Mrs. Walker. She has a few weeks left. Months if she’s lucky. I couldn’t just… I gave her hope, that’s all.”  
  
“Cruelty really doesn’t become you,” Crowley said quietly.  
  
“Don’t be stupid. Not for herself—for the future, for her family. That peace will comfort her children, and their grief will be shorter. They’ll remember her that way, not sick and suffering.” Aziraphale palmed the back of his neck, tight and slightly gummy. “Kindness spreads like ripples in a pond, perpetuates itself just as frustration and anger do.”  
  
Crowley shook his head and paced away and back again, stretching the edge of the veil that hid them. “Pay it forward, that’s the best you’ve got?”  
  
“Do you have better? This isn’t different than what you do.” Aziraphale’s bones hurt, and a tight headache was building behind his eyes right now that no amount of focus or angelic healing could seem to dispel. He needed to do this, to feel useful, to do some good in the world now that they were reasonably assured that there would still be a world to do good in.  
  
He wanted tea, and good food in a plush restaurant, and a drink. And for Crowley not to stand there like a challenge, like an adversary. This was one of the reasons they’d come to the Arrangement. After a while all the challenges and wiles and thwarting just became too much work; it was exhausting. “And maybe she will repent, or maybe the rules have changed enough that the good she did will outweigh the darkness. I don’t know. Neither do you.”  
  
Crowley made a sharp noise, something like a laugh. “Ineffability. Right.”  
  
“Maybe.” In the absence of knowledge, faith sometimes had to suffice. After everything else, though, trust in the ineffable plan was more difficult than it should be, especially when it seemed more like pinball than purpose. He felt perilously close to doubt.  
  
It didn’t matter, it _shouldn’t_ matter, where Mrs. Walker’s soul fell along some mostly arbitrary dividing line. Good people sometimes did abhorrent things— Shakespeare had more than a little to say on that subject—and in the core of his being Aziraphale believed that even the lowest soul contained a mote of goodness. Compassion wasn’t about tallying cosmic scorecards. The entire notion was repugnant, but then so was the apocalypse.  
  
He’d give quite a lot for that cup of tea right now. He would have miracled one up for himself, but there were already too many miracles here tonight—a bit of healing, a double payout on a life insurance policy, an elevator mysteriously broken just as an angry man was looking for his estranged wife. A cup of good tea… that energy could be better spent.  
  
Part of him was tempted to do something _big_ just to see if it got Heaven’s attention, except that he wasn’t certain at the moment if he wanted it.  
  
“You’re right,” Crowley said after long moments of the intercom buzzing and the orderlies gossiping and a hundred monitors beeping, “nobody knows anymore. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still an ass, but you’re not mistaken.”  
  
It was as close to an apology as Crowley was likely to give. Aziraphale decided to accept it. “Thank you.”  
  
“Come on then, your Mrs. Walker is out cold. If you’re determined to suffer, the least, and I mean the _very_ least, I can do is show you where to go about it. I was headed up to Five anyway,” Crowley said, nodded toward the elevator and slid his sunglasses on. Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him, but Crowley didn’t even have the grace to feign embarrassment. “The billing department is there. They have a new software that’s supposed to streamline all the paperwork. Don’t look at me like that—I put a lot of work into those forms, and I can’t have the humans come along and do a work-around.”  
  
Aziraphale wondered how this wasn’t messing people about, but if he was willing to take risks, he could only allow that Crowley could likewise do so.  
  
Crowley was still talking. “They’re using my system Downstairs, you know.”  
  
“Oh. Congratulations on that,” he said sincerely. “I would have thought that they’d prefer something more streamlined, personally.”  
  
Crowley snorted. “No. No, it’s all about the bureaucratic suffering in the main offices.”  
  
“Well, I suppose that makes sense.” His shoes squeaked on the floors. From the corners of his vision he could see Crowley’s reflection in the tile, a faded shadow reaching downward. “Have you heard anything yet, from…?” he waved his hand vaguely toward the floor.  
  
“No, not since, well. You?”  
  
“No.” He followed Crowley over to the elevator. Mrs. Walker’s daughter would be by soon, and it was best to be gone then anyway. Crowley pushed the elevator call button, lighting it up in a circle of white not unlike a Christmas card halo. Going up.  
  
“Crowley, what if we never hear from them? What if we’re cut off?” Aziraphale bit back against a wave of diffuse panic. He’d spent centuries at a time not hearing anything directly from his superiors, but this new world was uncharted territory, and it frightened him. “It’s not that I particularly want to go back, but I don’t like the idea that I _can’t_.”  
  
“There are worse fates that I can think of,” Crowley said, rocking back on his heels, impatient. He pushed the call button again, and glanced over at Aziraphale before casually passing him a cup of tea that hadn’t been there a moment before. “What’s his name, Adam? Maybe this is his way of making sure that no one is up to stuff.”  
  
It was difficult to argue with that. Aziraphale cradled the warm paper cup in both hands and let the fragrant steam fog his glasses before taking a drink. Earl Grey. The elevator whirred behind the closed doors. Another nursery song played.  
  
“Why did you choose her?” Crowley slid his glasses down and peered at him, yellow eyes over black rims. “Your Mrs. Walker. Why her?”  
  
_Because her children are grown and her husband is gone, and she never had much in the way of friends. She’s alone_. Out loud he just said, “Her room was the first one off the elevator.”  
  
Crowley had the grace, in that moment, not to call him on the lie.

 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

End

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments really do make the world go 'round.
> 
> A big thank you to the glorious Devo for beta-reading. All mistakes are, of course, mine own.


End file.
